Virtual training

The Five Key Elements of an Effective Training Environment

The CloudShare Team

Jul 27, 2023 - 3 min read

The effectiveness of any training program ultimately comes down to two things:

• The guiding strategy under which the program and its content were developed.
• The environment in which the training takes place.

Today, we’re going to talk about the second one. What constitutes an effective training environment? More importantly, how can you create one for both your customers and your employees?

What Is a Training Environment, Exactly?

A training environment refers to a setting or platform where individuals work to develop new skills, knowledge, or competencies. They can take many different forms and formats, including physical classrooms, virtual training labs, and simulated sandbox environments. Many businesses are increasingly embracing blended environments that incorporate multiple different types of training.

The Importance of Creating an Effective Training Environment

Without the right training environment, it doesn’t matter how much work a business has put into its training materials. It will be impossible to deliver that content. For employees, this means they cannot:

• Refine their existing skill set or develop new skills.
• Learn about and adapt to changes in their industry.
• Develop their knowledge about critical topics such as security.
• Pursue professional development in the workplace.

For customers, meanwhile, this means your organization will lack an effective onboarding process. You’ll have to hope that whatever knowledge base you provide on your website will be enough for customers to learn the ins and outs of your software. Even then, you’re going to be dealing with customer retention issues and increased churn.

What are the Characteristics of an Effective Training Environment?

Personalized

Everyone has a different learning style and different learning preferences. Moreover, if we’re talking about customer training, every customer uses your software in a slightly different way. This means that no two training environments should be exactly alike.

Instead, your organization should tailor its training based on factors including, but not limited to:

• The user’s skill and knowledge level prior to training.
• How the user prefers to digest material — do they want to pursue the content at their own pace and on their own time, or would they prefer the guidance of an instructor?
• If relevant, the operating environment in which the user will deploy your software, including infrastructure, key integrations, etc.
• The user’s industry or vertical if it differs from your own.

Hands-On

Passive training is both ineffective and obsolete. For your training environment to truly resonate with your users, it needs to be interactive. It needs to provide users with an opportunity to go beyond reading, watching and rote memorization.

If you’re providing a customer with software training, for instance, your training should include an opportunity to experience that software firsthand.

Collaborative

If there’s one thing every business with a culture of learning has in common, it’s that they foster open communication and collaboration. Your training environments should do the same. Participants should always be able to reach out to either your instructors or to fellow users.

Constructive

Training and feedback go hand-in-hand. Your users should, if they so choose, be able to receive immediate guidance on how and where they can improve. More importantly, they should be given the opportunity to provide your business with feedback on the effectiveness of its training.

Usage and behavioral analytics can only tell you so much, after all — direct input from people who’ve completed your training is arguably some of the most valuable information you’ll ever receive.

Accessible

Your users won’t always be able to travel and attend in-person training, nor is it feasible to expect your customer success team to personally be on-site to guide customers through their software deployment. Instead, you need to build a training environment that can be delivered remotely — through the cloud, for instance. In addition to enabling significantly more flexibility and scalability, this style of virtual training environment also saves your business both time and money.

Build the Right Environment for your Training Program With CloudShare

Whether for the purposes of professional development, cybersecurity training, or customer onboarding, learning cannot happen in a vacuum. Your organization needs to ensure that it can provide the right training environments. Otherwise, you might as well retire your training program altogether.

It’s one thing to talk about why training environments are important, but another altogether to actually create those environments. That’s where CloudShare comes in. We provide our customers with simple, powerful, and infinitely scalable virtual IT labs to help them create compelling, custom-tailored training environments for any use case.

More importantly, we help them do so in a matter of minutes — reach out to book a demo today, and let us show you firsthand.